Switching between subjective and objective modes is the essence of the scientific modus operandi. Not many people seem to appreciate that. Science is all about riding two horses, maybe not in concert, but certainly alternately - and knowing when to switch from one to the other.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

This science bod was paid a big compliment today, probably the biggest he's been paid in his entire life. I'll spare you the details, dear reader, except to say that I try to let compliments, like brickbats, fly over my head, so as not to be too distracted by what other folk think of me and my peculiar mission in life. Which is what you may ask?

Fortunately, I had my camera and the pictures it took in a blustery Lyon this morning to demonstrate what turns me on, what gives me a buzz (recalling this site calls itself science buzz).

First, those pictures.

There I was with my dear wife, crossing a bridge that separates Old Lyon from the Presque Ile (peninsula) that separates the Rhone and the Saone just short of their confluence. Suddenly a fierce wind got up from downstream (the south) a short way from the confluence of the two rivers, which made the River Saone under the bridge become flecked with foam, seeming to flow against its N-S direction.

The river is flowing AWAY from me, despite those white-capped waves that seem to be coming towards the camera

Here are autumn leaves that have collected on the lee side of that wind coming from the right, with very few visible elsewhere.

Here's the same view a short while later, where a fresh gust of wind has caused a few of those leaves in the sheltered side of the footbridge to become airborne. A minute or two later they were back where they started. Why?

My wife offered an entirely reasonable and commonsensical explanation for what you see in these pictures. "The wind has blown the leaves into that area on the right".

But how can that be, when the wind if blowing right to left in these pictures?

An entirely different explanation occurs to me, one which is apposite at the present time, given attempts by some in Shroudology to re-invent chemistry as 'stochastic physics'. (Chemistry has always featured a random element where molecular collisions, productive or unproductive are concerned, but does not generally try to track the path of individual molecules, being content merely to explain and predict the end-result in gross terms of billions of such collisions).

The leaves are not being blown into that sheltered side. The leaves are being blown into the air, and are settling all over the place. But when leaves just happen by chance to land in that sheltered spot, they tend to stay put, whereas leaves that land elsewhere, in less sheltered spots, tend to get lifted back into the air. Bit by bit, leaves tend to fall at random into the sheltered spot, so with time, one sees more and more leaves there, and fewer and fewer leaves elsewhere. The leaves were NOT blown preferentially into that sheltered spot.

Methinks there's a parable there, not only for chemistry, but biochemistry too (my specialist subject).

I got a buzz this morning for seeing macroscopic objects (dead leaves) behaving like atoms and molecules.

I get a buzz too from looking at the claims made by fellow 'Shroudies' and thinking to myself: "Suppose the process of image formation were not as 'intuitive' as one might think. Suppose the end-result came about by processes that are not intuitive, dare one say "commonsensical". Suppose the TS image has a thousand possible explanations, only one of which is correct? How can one set about determining which is the correct explanation? For some of us, the buzz comes from meeting that challenge.

For scientists like myself, there is a simple answer to that question (which may or may not lead to the correct end-result, at least in one's own lifetime). It requires no great feats of imagination or intellect - one must simply get experimenting. It matters not a jot whether the initial working models are right, or possibly right, or indeed possibly or even probably wrong.

The important thing is to keep EXPERIMENTING. It keeps the mind (reasonably) free of preconceptions and dogma. It makes one more amenable to ideas and possibilities that take time to incubate.

Addendum Friday October 10

Here's a piccy I took yesterday morning at the end of the tapering spit of land midstream where the Rhone (left) and Saone (right) come together a short way south of Lyon city centre.

And here's your blogger at that same precise spot, whose troosers don't always look like that (please believe me when I say there's still that fierce wind blowing from the south that is REVERSING the current, at least on the surface, with dead leaves and other detritus being gently moved UPSTREAM).

No, I don't have ambitions to be the next Pope, practising for an appearance on the balcony at St.Peters. The gesture is a standard one I routinely employ when standing as so often I do at the confluence of major rivers. It allows my small band of admirers (and larger army of detractors) to deduce the direction from which the two riversconverge.

Afterthought (for Hugh Farey in Comments in the first instance ): I do in fact have a short video clip, showing the behaviour of those leaves on the windy bridge, which I'm studying at the moment to try and decide how much of the shift to the wind-sheltered side is random, v. how much was assisted by Bernouilli effect, eddies, vortices etc. etc. (given the wind was in the wrong direction to blow them there directly). Sadly the video will not upload to this blog (despite there being a button that's supposed to make that possible). Here's a screen grab still image to be getting on with.

I've now learned to clip videos in MS Movie Maker, thereby cutting my windswept wife out of the picture, and still my now diminished 10 second video file fails to upload, despite an on-screen icon that suggests it's supposed to be happening (shame about the static progress bar). Don't you just hate clunky software that doesn't work, and, more to the point, keeps you hanging around for 10-15 minutes to realize it does not work.

My loathing for all things to do with Californian software is exceeded only by the French public transport system, once the envy of Europe, and now in free fall.

2 comments:

Did you notice how the leaves arrived? Did they just drop out of the air or did they swirl in from left to right in an eddy caused by the Bernoulli effect as the wind blew over the wall? Just askin'...

ps. See all that stuff about singlet oxygen on shroudstory. All Greek to me...

How very perceptive of you Hugh. It did occur to me after posting that the leaves may indeed have been "sucked" into that sheltered spot via some kind of aerodynamic effect (I'd forgotten about it being systematized by Bernoulli). Indeed, they probably were, so it's not entirely random if there's a pull effect. But I'd still maintain that the leaves are not being "blown" by the wind into that sheltered spot, and that once there they find themselves in a dead zone from which it then takes an exceptionally fierce gust of wind (and extra-strong Bernoulli effect) to dislodge them.

Singlet oxygen? It actually has a surprisingly long survival time - an hour or more, it not being a free radical, but something rather more subtle re configuration of spin-paired electrons. See tail end of a posting I did a while ago:

Shortcut to Comments (latest posting only)

Home Page/Latest posting

About Me

Colin Berry, aka sciencebod, is a retired PhD researcher/teacher/academic who has worked in industry, medical schools, schools, food and biomedical research (mainly in the UK, but also in W.Africa and the United States). He's best known for his work on RESISTANT STARCH, recently described as "the trendiest form of dietary fibre".
See also his specialist Shroud of Turin blog on www.shroudofturinwithoutallthehype.wordpress.com
with over 200 postings to date.

Create one's own blog (age, class, gender no barrier)

It's really quite straightforward. All one has to do is to click on the photograph with that nice young man. One can then be part of the frightfully interesting Blogger community in just a couple of jiffs.

Acknowledgment

What's the latest on the LHC?

LHC gets warning system upgrade : BBC 28 September 2009

Self-organization

From wiki entry on SELF ORGANIZATION: "As a result, processes considered part of thermodynamically open systems, such as biological processes that are constantly receiving, transforming and dissipating chemical energy (and even the earth itself which is constantly receiving and dissipating solar energy), can and do exhibit properties of self organization far from thermodynamic equilibrium."

How far away should your off-licence be for a bottle of wine to be energy-neutral?

What do these two have in common?

Answer: both arrived in this world about the same time. Sir Isaac Newton was born on 4th Jan 1643 (new style*). The Taj Mahal had a 20 year gestation period, centred on approximately the same year. Click on piccy for an older post .* Or Christmas Day, 1642, depending which dating system one uses.

Is interstellar space travel feasible?

The nearest star (more correctly, star system, since it's 3 stars, a binary and a smaller satellite star) is Alpha Centauri. The average distance from Earth is 4.3 light years. Suppose technology allows us one day to achieve an interstellar cruising speed of half the speed of light. A comfortable acceleration of g (simulating Earth's gravity) would take a year, with another year to slow down comfortably. The entire journey from Earth would take a minimum of 10 years approximately. Having arrived at one's destination, it would take 4.3 years to send a radio postcard (" Hello Mum and Dad. Have arrived safely, and am now looking for a habitable planet. Am hoping it's hiding behind Proxima. Have looked everywhere else... Would die for some Cheddar cheese... ")

Watch this space

It's a cheap and cheerful form of transcendental meditation.(experimenting with settings, actually)

What causes weather?

Could you answer that question in just 7 words, ie " weather is due to...? Need some help, " Weather is due to t- - u - - - - - - h - - - - - - o - t - - E- - - -'s s - - - - - - ." The National Curriculum (England and Wales) does have its uses, but there are many more such simple principles, expressed in a minimum of words, that could be usefully incorporated.

"Had there been a Beginning (there wasn't, as it happens), there would initially have been complete Nothingness. But just as Nature abhors a vacuum, it's totally gutted at the thought of Nothingness. I mean to say - how far does Nothingness extend, assuming it has one of more dimensions? It can't extend for an infinite distance, since that would be a physical impossibility. Nothingness, to avoid having infinite reach, coils up on itself to acquire finite dimensions. In so doing, it becomes Somethingness, which has a spring-like potential energy - the total energy in fact of the Universe.

From that potential energy, present in what we now call space, or space-time, which is anything but empty, is spawned all sub-atomic particles - both matter and antimatter. When those particles collide, they mutually annihilate to create photons.

The reverse can also happen under extreme conditions - two photons can collide to create matter and anti-matter. It is potential energy in the spring-coiled Universe that is our "Dark Energy. It may or may not have mass depending on conditions.

A moment when it has no mass is the instant of the Big Bang. Let me briefly explain. An oscillating universe switches between Big Bang and Big Crunch. With the latter gravitation pulls everything into a super blackhole which then becomes a singularity - a massively dense point in space-time.

What prevents it becoming infinitely small - a physical impossibility? Answer: friction. As the sub-atomic plasma contracts and grinds, heat is generated which cannot escape - being a black hole. The temperature rises, ie particles in the plasma move faster and faster. When they reach their maximum velocity - the speed of light- all particles are suddenly transformed into photons, which as we know have no true mass(at least, no rest mass: any mass they have is purely relativistic due to their speed).

Once the entire Universe is a super-concentration of photons, all the gravitational forces in the singularity collapse to zero, or nearly so, and the entire thing blows apart - a new Big Bang, to create yet another cycle (inflation, Big Crunch, implosion etc). The Big Bang creates not just sub-atomic particles - from photon-photon collisions, but space-time itself. To reiterate: that space-time is always suffused with the stored potential energy of our curled-up dimensions (Dark Energy)."